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by jychang 44 days ago
None of those things are easily recognized though. They're not universals. A term like "cognitive biases" generally require a college level education.

If you go to a tribe in the middle of the rainforest, would they be able to explain those concepts? Of course not.

Plus, I already gave an example of a species wide bias at the end of the comment- phone addiction for kids. I'm clearly not saying it's impossible for a human to spot a bias, but rather... how many 5 year old kids recognize that phone addiction is a bad thing?
1 comments
chongli 43 days ago
You’ve moved the goalposts.

You’ve gone from “people within the species not being able to easily recognize a bias” to “people universally recognizing that bias, even with no education or contact with the rest of civilization.”

That’s silly, and something I’d never argue for. To me, something is easy for humans to recognize if a 19th century scientist could discover it. We are a social and cultural species. Culture is how we learn anything over the long run.

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jychang 42 days ago
That's an extremely high bar. To use something off the top of my head: a 19th century scientist discovered Algebraic topology, does that make Algebraic topology easy?

It's pretty clear for me to argue that those things are NOT intuitive at all, and not easy to recognize. That's not changing the goalposts at all. Would the median american voter understand Poincaré's contributions to algebraic topology? Obviously not. Things that are easy for people to recognize: "touching a hot stove burns you". Things that are not easy for people to recognize: Poincaré's contributions to algebraic topology.

Honestly, your argument falls apart the moment you think about it critically. If it was so easy to recognize bias, then wouldn't all the people in the species already recognized it and voted to shape our legal system to handle any such bias, so it wouldn't be an issue right now? Clearly, that's not the case (we're still dealing with such issues), and understanding such biases is obviously an issue for people in the general public.

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